


A redder shade of pale

by yesfir



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Anal Sex, Angst and Fluff and Smut, Bulges and Nooks (Homestuck), Fluff and Humor, Fluff and Smut, Foreplay, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Mildly Dubious Consent, Karkat is scandalized, M/M, Nipple Play, Quadrant mixing, Tentacle Dick, Tentacle Sex, YOU GUYS KNOW WHAT I MEAN, and all that trauma, and lots of dumb jokes, but mostly it's just fluff and smut, but yeah references to Dave's shitty childhood, cute shit, i'm talking about the davekat is canon scene, listen it's just a lot of these things, so uh, the boys bickering like an old married couple, the usual stuff, there's a bucket, yep, you know
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-18
Updated: 2020-10-18
Packaged: 2021-03-09 00:26:34
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,955
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27075694
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yesfir/pseuds/yesfir
Summary: Karkat opens his mouth, but nothing comes out except for a faint noise which lands somewhere between keening and squeaking. His cheeks are flushed, his jaw is doing some kind of minimalist gymnastics, and his eyes are wide and startled but also so... so fucking soft. As if he cannot believe that this is real, but for as long as it lasts he is going to hold on to it and get as much out of it as possible. You know that feeling. You still can’t quite believe it either, but god, you’ve already waited far too long for this. You can’t waste a single goddamn moment.(karkat and dave have sex with each other for the second time ever, and dave finds out that karkat is more than a little fond of - GASP - quadrant mixing in bed. it's very scandalous and kinky, and definitely not at all adorable. nope.)[takes place in the time between epilogues (meat) and HS2]
Relationships: Dave Strider/Karkat Vantas
Comments: 10
Kudos: 172





	A redder shade of pale

**Author's Note:**

> sometimes when you are writing a lot of Huge Plot Things in your other fics, you just need a palate cleanser. in this case, over 7000 words of fluffy davekat smut, just because.

It’s not even accurate to say that you’d made sure to get a room together, because the truth is that everyone just assumed. As in, when you went through the layout of this preposterous hunk of space travelling high-tech junk which you’d say Jake ought to be publicly flogged for designing if the guy clearly hadn’t gone through enough humiliation as it is… well, you’d plopped your finger down on a room at random and said, cool, that’s mine, I claim it in the name of guys who don’t want to fuck around haggling over rooms and just get going already. And Roxy had said alright, that’s Dave and Karkat’s room, and that was that. No one so much as raised an eyebrow, you included, and the only reaction to the statement was a very faint flush on Karkat’s cheeks and an almost imperceptible deepening of his permanent frown, and you’re not entirely sure if anyone else noticed.

Maybe it was just that, well, he and you have after all lived together ever since you first arrived on Earth C, so it makes sense to assume that you’d want to be roomies now. Except that doesn’t even remotely check out, not when there’s rooms enough that no one would have to share with anyone unless they absolutely want to. Besides, there definitely _is_ a difference between living in the same house and sharing a room.

Especially since the plans clearly showed that, in the words of the most portentous shipping prophesies, _there was only one bed_.

So maybe you can just stop being skittish about the whole thing and admit that the reason you all assumed as much is because you and Karkat have been a fact written on every wall in five-foot letters for everyone to see for fucking _years_ now, and your friends are beyond relieved that some of that unresolved tension has let up and they can finally act like the two of you are basically married without it turning into this huge Thing. By which you mostly mean the two of your friends present for this journey, because you’re not counting the creepy silent presence that appears to be wearing Jade like a skin suit, and though Calliope is in fact someone you would describe as a friend, they’ve been so thoroughly elusive recently that you honestly don’t know what their reaction to your change in relationship status is, if any. It seems like the sort of thing they would once have been pretty jazzed about, perhaps even a bit too jazzed to not directly border on the horrendously socially awkward, but you suppose that’s an ordeal you have been spared for now.

Yeah. Your friend-brother-father and walking trauma trigger has turned fully anime villain and kidnapped your sister away from her loving wife, but at least you haven’t had a rather sweet skull alien refer to you and Karkat as one of their OTPs yet. Small blessings, and all that.

Anyway. Your room. It looks a little barren yet, because you haven’t had time to go absolutely fucking bananas with the alchemizing equipment and homebrew some sick home décor shit that Karkat is absolutely going to hate. With your hoodie slung over a chair and your shoes kicked into the corner where the wardrobifyer is, it looks at least a bit more lived in. You notice how one of Karkat’s eyebrows twitch, because he’s an incurable neat freak and cannot understand how come you’re not, but he doesn’t say anything about it yet. He just sighs in obvious relief and slumps onto the bed, collapsing onto his back and staring vacantly at the ceiling.

You hesitate for a moment, glancing back at the door to confirm that he closed it behind him, and you feel more than a bit fucking silly about it. It’s not like anyone else on this idiotic space boat is desperate to come peeping through the door of the one established couple, especially not the world’s biggest lesbian or a dude you still persistently can’t help calling ‘mom’. No doubt they’re also off getting settled in for the night, now that you’ve left Earth C’s atmosphere far behind and are traveling at a steady pace towards your imperceptible goal. There’s nothing to worry about.

Even so, the sight of the closed door seems to undo some inner part of you that despite your best efforts keeps knotting itself up every time you and Karkat have company. You’ve attempted to be more chill about it, to be the one of the two of you that doesn’t have a conniption every time your more tender feelings run the risk of being perceived by outside observers, but the moment you actually start thinking about it you’re immediately paralyzed in the glare of your own embarrassment like a deer a fraction of a second away from becoming an airborne piece of tenderized game. Try as you might, you cannot help but to be thoroughly mortified by the ordeal of being known by anyone except Karkat, and since he seems to feel the same way, you both exist in a state that you’re sure Heisenberg would approve of, the ambivalent bastard. It’s possible for another person to perceive Dave and Karkat not being pathetically self-concious and keyed up, or to perceive them actually doing couply stuff together, but not both.

You hope at some point you might get past that, because it seems like a thoroughly ridiculous way to exist, but you might as well accept it for the time being.

Right now, however, you don’t have to worry about all that. So you stroll over to Karkat’s prone form and allow yourself to not so much pitch forward as glide casually into place until you’re hovering right above him, leaving about an inch of space between your bodies as you not-quite-float there, since your feet are still nominally connected to the ground. You keep your hands folded under your chin, your elbows splayed out wide and resting comfortably on thin air, and Karkat glares pointedly at you.

“It’s really fucking amazing how many completely normal, everyday actions you manage to adapt into something incomprehensibly pointless, impractical or simply inane, solely for the express purpose of rubbing it in my face that you can fly and I cannot. Really, I’m impressed. This is definitely my impressed tone, and not at all my cut-that-smug-shit-out-before-I-strangle-you-with-your-own-goofy-cape-Dave-so-help-me-god tone. The difference is the putrid whiff of resignation clinging to every word, because no matter what I say about it, no matter how pathetic my pleas, you’re never going to stop, and I guess I don’t want to send you to a Just death quite yet.”

“Okay.” Your lips soften slightly as they quirk into a small smile, and you let your body settle on top of his, smoothly allowing gravity to align you in a position that is both somewhat awkward and really quite comfortable at the same time. You slide your arms under his in order to support yourself without pinning him down. As you found out that one time when he accidentally locked himself into the storage closet and he proceeded to have this whole freakout about it, Karkat is more than a little bit claustrophobic. You’re not sure if holding him down would feel the same to him as being trapped in a small, dark space, but you don’t want to take any chances with his comfort levels. You’re still figuring out this whole physical intimacy thing as it is, and you personally don’t think that a panic attack would be a helpful addition. “Is this better?”

Karkat opens his mouth, but nothing comes out except for a faint noise which lands somewhere between keening and squeaking. His cheeks are flushed, his jaw is doing some kind of minimalist gymnastics, and his eyes are wide and startled but also so... so fucking soft. As if he cannot believe that this is real, but for as long as it lasts he is going to hold on to it and get as much out of it as possible. You know that feeling. You still can’t quite believe it either, but god, you’ve already waited far too long for this. You can’t waste a single goddamn moment.

The last time you got intimate with each other, it had all been… Well, look, the whole thing had been kind of weird and rushed. It had also been great, obviously, literally the best thing to ever happen in your life, and you’re absolutely certain that in terms of two guys losing their long-held-onto virginity with each other, you quite frankly succeeded with flying colours as far as performance is concerned. When it came to not actually sucking that badly at sex despite your previous lack of experience, you had simply been the best there is. But still…

First there had been that strange sensation of being herded, of something inside you basically twisting your arm and shoving you into Karkat’s arms. It had filled your head with weird and uncomfortable ideas about power dynamics, and of treating the situation as something you could win or lose, some of which had sat so viscerally wrong with you that you’d actually started to feel kind of sick. You’d known it was wrong, because it was so fundamentally different from everything you’d ever felt about Karkat, so absolutely alien to everything you are.

You’d never, ever thought of Karkat as something to claim, some kind of reward you hadn’t managed to figure out how to unlock yet. He’s part of your _life,_ he’s your best friend, and even if loving him and being too much of a fucking coward to actually take the step was torturous, there had never been a single moment when you thought of what you were to each other as some kind of _failure_. You’d never been ashamed of being ‘just friends’, because that’s horseshit. And if one thing is for damn certain, it’s that you’d choke to death on your own collection dead shit in jars before you _ever_ projected the image of some kind of tragically pining, passive damsel onto Karkat. Just because he had feelings for you but was trying, like a completely normal person who understands boundaries, to respect that you weren’t ready to accept them.

The feeling had been such an awful cocktail of baggage heavily laden with shit, a mix of that one time when random thoughts kept derailing your already scrambled mind while you were trying to have a conversation with Terezi, that painful sense of self-awareness you associated with interacting with the dream bubbles, and that childhood horror which slowly bled into your mind and your body as you became more and more certain that Bro was watching you. At the time… you’re not even sure exactly how you’d rationalized it to yourself. Or more to the point, you hadn’t. All you’d known is that _something_ was wrong, that _something_ was in your head and it wanted you to think and act and feel like someone else, like a person you didn’t want to be. You’d spent way too much fucking time being molded, being drilled to embody an archetype you could never truly live up to, to not feel your entire soul seize up as it happened to you once again. The ill-fitting persona was different, but the violation of integrity was the same. Only this time around, you actually knew how fucked up it was. This time you’d known that this wasn’t you, because unlike when you were a kid, you actually know who you are now.

This time, you’d been able to refuse.

Of course in hindsight, even with the very scant information you have, it would be easy to draw certain inevitable conclusions about what had been happening. Only you don’t want to. You’ll even go so far as to say that you most emphatically refuse. You don’t want to think even for a fucking moment that he- that Dirk had- that you’d- you just don’t. You’re not gonna. Nah. Absolutely the fuck not. You are formally absconding right off this nauseating train of thought before it takes you into some seriously dark places.

Instead you’ll think of what happened after, and how perfect it had been – but also, like you’d said, really goddamn rushed. You don’t think either of you can be blamed for that. After years of silently yearning for each other, when you finally get to put your lips and hands on the person you’ve been dreaming of and do the things you’ve always wanted to do, there comes a point where protocol and common sense has to politely stand aside for the raging tides of lust, or get knocked over and summarily drowned.

It had been fast, and messy, and intensely passionate. It had completely ruined your sofa’s upholstery, to such a degree that when your friends came knocking on your door later, you’d felt compelled to time travel back to an earlier point and get some new sofa cushions to hastily throw on there, lest you’d have to face their knowing looks as they carefully avoided mentioning it. Also so that you’d all actually have somewhere to sit, because obviously Kanaya and Roxy weren’t going to be comfortable placing their butts on top of the pollockesque spectacle you had helped Karkat create.

You hear Karkat let out an irritable sigh, and you’re snapped back to the present, as well as to the embarrassing realization that you’d completely spaced out on him. You offer him a sheepish little grin and kiss the tip of his nose in compensation. He rolls his eyes and reaches up, pulling off your shades as if it’s the most natural thing in the world, and he’s almost offensively casual about it as he lightly tosses them over his shoulder and off the bed. You can’t see where they land, and when you crane your neck a bit to locate them, Karkat grabs you by the front of your shirt and tugs you back down.

“Oh no you don’t,” he growls, baring his teeth with a tiny trill of irritated chittering sounds. “Holy shitting fuck, Dave, I can’t believe you’re really this easily distracted, but apparently even while attempting to actually be smooth about this, any influence with the approximate force of a bout of cheese critter flatulence is enough to completely scatter your thoughts to the winds. Please pay attention to me and nothing else right now, you feeble-sponged imbecile. How hard is that?”

“Not that hard yet, but I’m getting there?”

Look, the answer is practically a knee jerk reaction, it jumps over your lips that fast. Karkat is used enough to your casual dick jokes that he basically manages to go through all the required stages of grief in a second flat, and then he groans and bats feebly at your face while demonstratively turning his away. “Is it too late to change my mind?” he demands.

“Well, not if you actually meant it. But since you don’t… yeah, definitely.” You lean in and take advantage of the position of his head by starting to press a series of progressively wetter kisses to the skin of his neck, right on that sort of ridged area where even land dwelling trolls have these little proto-gills. His breathing immediately turns into a fluttering mess of gasps and little throaty sounds, which you won’t lie, that’s incredibly satisfying, not to mention flattering. Also really, really hot. The sensation hits you in this slow, powerful jolt down your spine, not quite like electricity and not like a physical blow, but somewhere in between those two. You groan quietly against Karkat’s skin, shifting your crotch slightly against his thigh, trying to find a level of pressure that feels enough without also actively crushing your half-hard dick, and it’s tricky.

When trying to find a way for your own body to relate to someone else’s, you’re quickly finding that it’s inevitably going to be kind of like two people trying to learn a specific dance together, after only watching or reading about other people doing it to completely different music. Awkward as fuck, in other words. Even that first time, when you’d honestly been so damn eager to keep touching each other that you kind of didn’t care too much about being comfortable, there had still been these weird little moments where progress was momentarily delayed by the fact that neither of you knew what the hell you were doing. Of course you’d known it wouldn’t actually be like in porn, where everyone is perfect and as long as a position is hot that automatically means it’s also enjoyable. But it’s one of those things where just knowing and actually experiencing it are two wildly separate things, and you’d never dreamed that you could feel so incompetent and still so amazingly proud of yourself at the same time.

You suspect it doesn’t help, of course, to be together with someone who has a rather distinctly different sexual anatomy than yourself. For all the Earth C troll porn you will admit that you have watched in the spirit of combining scientific inquiry with good old fashioned masturbation, you definitely hadn’t been prepared for that. But hey, at least you’re in this awkward mess together.

The point is that the angle of your legs is starting to make you cramp a bit, and you feel like it might not be super easy for Karkat to breathe like this either. So you lift yourself up until you’re once again hovering slightly, and then whisper, “Hey, scoot up a bit,” in his ear. He makes a slightly disgruntled sound when you stop kissing his neck, but does as you ask, shimmying backwards until he’s fully on the bed. You float after him, settling back down on top of his hips and pulling your shirt off in one balletic movement, grinning as Karkat huffs and calls you a showoff. You try to lean in again, but he puts a hand on your chest to stop you, and then squirms out of his shirt in a much less graceful maneuver which you nonetheless enjoy watching, because his eagerness to wear less clothes around you is so obvious in the way he moves.

You run your fingertips slowly up from his hips, all the way to his shoulders. He squirms a bit when they skid over his ribs – or whatever the fuck trolls call them – but then he closes his eyes and breathes out quietly, looking blissful. So you keep running your hands over him, occasionally curling your fingers and dragging your nails gently across his skin. You’ve seen him shirtless before of course, but it’s still pretty trippy to look at someone who is basically humanoid but has no nipples. No point focusing your energy there, then, but he seems to particularly like you touching his hips and his shoulders, humming happily as you paint idle figures with your nails there. You also tentatively brush one hand briefly across the red marks on the side of his torso, but he winces and quickly moves your hand away. You don’t think it hurt, but since he doesn’t want you to touch him there, it’s really easy to just… not do that. You mumble an apology and lean in and kiss him instead, and he immediately snakes his arms around your neck and presses his body flush against yours.

You take more time to just make out with him this time around, because it’s actually a lot of fun to just kiss and touch, and you roll around on the bed in a tangle of limbs, feeling up different parts of each other experimentally. After a little while you slide a hand under his waistband and grab his ass with a happy little sigh. “The gold standard of ass, right here,” you inform him, and he nips at the skin under your ear with a hoarse giggle.

“Shit, really? Maybe I should’ve also worn tiny shorts and waved it around on the campaign trail, then. Wouldn’t have needed any kind of endorsement if I made the public love my ass as much as Jake’s. I can see absolutely no flaws in this plan whatsoever. An ironclad Strider masterpiece .”

“Absolutely,” you agree, noticing how his breathing goes a bit erratic when you slide one finger gently between his ass cheeks. “Incidentally, have I mentioned how I’ve always thought that the only way Obama could’ve been more awesome is if he’d worn micro short precisely all the time?”

“...Wait. Does that mean he sometimes did?”

“I wish. Don’t play with my heart like that,” you scold him, wriggling your hand further down until you find his thigh and experimentally dig your nails in there. Karkat arches his back and shudders, and as he does you can feel the way his bulge is moving around inside his pants, obviously ready for action. “Anyway, how about less clothes?”

“Less clothes,” he agrees. So you separate briefly to both get properly naked, eyeing each other with equal measures of nervousness and eagerness. The getting undressed part had been a rather impatient and incomplete affair last time, so you’re going to make a point of enjoying the view this time around. Karkat naturally looks smaller out of his baggy clothes, but spending a fair number of years in places where he consistently has had enough to eat and hasn’t been in constant and unrelenting mortal dread has rounded out the previously bony angles of his body, making him softer and steadier to lean against when you watch movies. Being able to eat regularly and not having to constantly fight until you drop from exhaustion has changed your body too, and while you probably will never stop looking like someone put you together using an anatomy guide for stick insects, at least you have an actual pair of shoulders now, and it’s not as easy to count your ribs anymore.

His bulge has fully extended itself from inside his nook, and is curled almost demurely against his body, smearing a small amount of liquid against his stomach. The vivid red of it makes a striking and quite attractive contrast against the grey of his skin. Also damn, that thing is really quite long. The ones in porn, of course, are often absolutely excessive, especially if you’re talking about trolls toward the cooler end of the spectrum. At least Karkat’s looks more proportional, but it’s still about the length of your forearm at the moment, although thankfully the same can’t be said for girth. The length to thickness ratio is malleable, from what you’ve seen, because of course no true tentadong would have it any other way. It’s also completely prehensile. More to the point, from where you’re sitting, it definitely looks like a friend.

You raise your gaze after a moment, only to realize that Karkat appears to be contemplating your body in a similar fashion. You snort out a small laugh, and he looks up, an embarrassed grimace quickly melting into one of those small smiles that are just for you. With little hesitation he then reaches out and firmly pinches your right nipple, suggesting that he has at least done _some_ research similar to the kind you’ve indulged in. You let out a surprised but absolutely not displeased little sound, leaning into his touch. He looks happy to have gotten that right, and keeps experimentally pinching and flicking at your nipples as he climbs on top of you. Then he leans in and uses his tongue instead, and you momentarily lose your already precarious thread of thoughts, pressing your eyes shut and swearing quietly under your breath. His bulge is lazily wrapping itself around your dick as he keeps alternately painting circles around your nipples and sucking lightly on them, and you’re quite sure that if you were to spend the rest of your life like this you would have very few regrets.

Then there are pointy teeth on your nipple, and you let out a small yelp. “Carefu-ohhh. _Oh,_ wow. Nevermind, please, keep- keep doing that. Fuck.”

Karkat lets out an amused little grunt and bites down again, carefully rolling your nipple between his teeth while he flicks his tongue at it. You’d always known they were sensitive, that hadn’t exactly been a tough riddle for an inquisitive teen with too much spare time to figure out, but this is something else. You’re pretty sure it’s excessive to be seeing stars just from a little nipple play, but hey, you’re absolutely not complaining. Especially as you can feel moisture starting to drip down your dick and pool slightly on your stomach, showing you exactly what kind of effect your enthusiastic little noises are having on Karkat.

Troll sex will always be messy, but you wouldn’t necessarily call that a drawback.

“Karkat, Karkat, oh my holiest of shits Karkat that’s amazing, I want- fuck, I want-” You have no idea exactly what it is you want, but you grab his hips and roll yours against them, shuddering at the way your dick slips and slides against his bulge. He makes a muffled sound and digs his claws into your shoulders, dragging them down your arms as he shivers against you. But he still keeps teasing you like that for a while longer, until you’re having to employ practically inhuman amounts of patience and self-control not to squirm and beg him for more. On one hand, it’s so damn good and you love it, but on the other hand you might just go insane if actual fucking doesn’t happen soon. So much for really taking your time with it. That is, you already have, and just the foreplay has definitely lasted longer than the whole thing did last time, but you suppose it will take a while for you to not be constantly lowkey desperate for everything he can give you, all the time.

He leans back slightly, though his bulge is still coiling around your dick, brushing slowly across the tip in a way that almost makes you forget how to breathe. Jesus, who gave him permission to be so fucking amazing? This is still Karkat, still your awkward best friend who treats affection like a grumpy stray alley cat half the time; it’s not like he’s suddenly turned into this super smooth sex god that you wouldn’t recognize, because that’d honestly be kind of freaky. It’s just that underlying gentleness and attention to people’s needs that permeates everything he does, which he’s suddenly using in ways that are rapidly threatening to dissolve your brain into a puddle of bulge-thirsty jelly.

He clears his throat, appearing to stifle a smile at your look of incoherent bliss.

“So, um… how do you want to…?”

A yes, the delicate question asked throughout all of history, wherever two or more people get down to combining their anatomies in exciting new ways. You untangle your cortex from its direct line to your crotch for a moment, remembering how to make words after a couple of false starts. “Well, I’m already on my back and I don’t really feel like moving, so...”

“Wow. You lazy piece of shit.” Karkat’s voice is fond, and he leans in to caress your cheek. “In that case, I think the angle would make it pretty awkward to get you inside my nook.” He’s right. The opening for the nook is a fair bit further up than a vagina would be, squarely in the area where a human would have their pubic bone, so it’d be pretty hard for him to just ride you. After what looks like some intense contemplation, Karkat gives you an inquisitive look and curls his hand under the back of your knee, tugging gently on it, looking like he can’t quite get the question out. After a moment of hesitation you obligingly spread your legs. Okay then.

You’d think that you’d be more nervous about this, what with all your previous issues, but instead you feel a thrill of sudden excitement, almost as if you’re getting away with something. The fact that it’s so easy to decide, that you feel so safe with him, is in itself pretty exciting. You raise your legs up and wait for him to grab a towel and lay it down under you, then he starts stroking your dick with his hand as he settles between your legs and makes himself comfortable. He’s definitely still a novice, and he’s tentative at the onset, fumbling a lot. But by listening attentively to your erratically murmured directions, he actually manages to reach a point where it feels so good that you have to ask him to slow down.

As for the main course, i.e. penetration, it kind of helps a lot that his bulge is both tapered and producing copious amounts of its own lubricant. At first you do tense up a bit as you try to adjust to the warm, wet intrusion, which admittedly isn’t the world’s most immediately sexy sensation, but after you’ve given yourself a moment to relax he can proceed with little trouble. You breathe slowly and try to just take in what’s happening, try to categorize the new sensory input from nerves that definitely aren’t used to this kind of thing. It’s like they’re saying what the duck is this, and you just have to keep assuring them that the situation is under control.

Karkat is moaning quietly against your chest, his body twitching with held-back tension, because obviously this is a lot more immediately enjoyable to him. It’s unexpectedly endearing. You smile and brush your hand through his thick hair, wrapping unruly curls around your fingertips and exhaling shakily as he pushes further inside you.

The whole affair takes some adjusting and careful angling, which at first just feels embarrassing and mildly uncomfortable, and also makes you way too aware that your asscrack is a lot slimier than you usually like it. Then Karkat somehow manages to curl his bulge back on itself, and you damn near pass out. You tilt your head sideways and urgently bite down on a fold in the blanket, which does basically nothing to mask the ragged whimpering sounds that are being forced from your lips with every experimental little shift and thrust. Your legs wrap themselves around Karkat on their own volition, as if that’ll somehow bring him closer than he already is, while your hands scramble frantically and without any real purpose across the sheets.

“Good?” Karkat whispers hoarsely, his breath heating your skin, and you manage a feeble little laugh.

“Good? Dude, you nearly killed me.”

“But in a good way?”

“Yeah.” You grin down at him. “In a good way.” He nods, his breathing urgent and harsh, and he seems to be trying really damn hard to keep control over himself as he makes sure you get what you need. You feel another surge of warm fondness as you watch the way his lips tremble, as he bares his teeth and rolls his body slowly against yours. Without thinking you reach out and gently place your hand on his cheek, making a low, soothing little sound. “That’s right, you’re doing good. Don’t worry about it, okay? Just try to breathe and be relaxed.”

You might as well have suggested some kind of filthy debauchery involving a whole orgy’s worth of people and a twelve-pack of horse dong dildos or something. Karkat’s half-lidded eyes fly wide open, and he stares at you in scandalized shock. In an almost equal amount of shock, your hand on his cheek stills, though you don’t have the wherewithal to move it. “Hey, are you-?” But now he’s squeezing his eyes shut instead, the color of his cheeks deepens into a fierce flush, his whole body trembles, and you distinctly feel his bulge twitch.

“Oh no. Oh no no no no, fuck, shit, oh fuuu _uuu_ … _”_

You move against him, wrapping your arms around him as his hips stutter in return and he completely unravels into a messy, sudden, incredibly drawn-out climax. You really don’t mind. You’d even say that what you feel is the exact opposite of minding, whatever that is. It’s wonderful to listen to the sounds he makes, to feel the way his body jolts and twists as pleasure overtakes him, to hold him as he collapses against you and gasps for air. It’s both adorable and hot at the same time. You still feel good just like this, with an absolute mess all over your ass and with him inside you, and you know he’s not going anywhere, so why worry about it?

“Sorry,” he mutters when he can manage to gather enough spare air to form words again.

“Don’t be,” you say, tugging a bit on one of his horns and awkwardly bending forward for long enough to press a kiss on his temple. “So uh… what happened there, huh?”

He presses his face even harder against your skin, letting out a mortified groan. “What do you _think_?”

“I mean, I know what happened in a purely mechanical sense, I don’t need a crash course in the history of premature ejaculation or anything, but what I meant is more like… what made it happen, I guess?”

Karkat might actually be dying from embarrassment, or at the very least he’s making a spirited attempt to do so, chiefly employing the method of slowly choking himself with your torso in his bid to hastily leave this mortal coil. If he dies without finishing you off, you decide, you will in fact be a little bit put out. “You- You- You shiteating globesponge, I can’t fucking believe you’re just… _asking_ me what happened like some kind of hilariously ignorant tool, when you’re the one who did something so blatantly _pale_ right in the middle of having sex. What the actual blistering fuck is wrong with you?”

Oh. Ohhhhhh.

“Ah, shit. That’s uh… not usually done, huh?”

“No!” Karkat’s voice hits an octave that could probably fracture glass. “No it absolutely isn’t, you sick fuck! I should think that’s painfully obvious even for your feeble human brain.”

“...Sooo. Gonna say something about how me doing that got you off almost instantly, or…?”

There are only muffled noises coming from Karkat for a while, as he places his arms over his head, apparently abandoning simple suffocation for the more exotic idea of burying himself alive in your chest. When he finally manages to unwind slightly, it’s only to give you a baleful look before he just slumps against you in resignation. “There are so many things wrong with me, I don’t even know what to start with. Congratulations, Dave, your matesprit is a broken fucking mess.”

You shrug, caressing his cheek gently, not particularly bothered by the exasperated look on his face. “Luckily, I kind of like you that way. And listen, the great thing about me being a human is that, as I think I’ve mentioned before, I don’t actually give that much of a fuck about quadrants. So if you get off from mixing them, well uh, that is in fact completely fucking normal for me and not this great taboo or super niche kink thing. Just say the word and I’ll tenderly calm your tits down in bed as much as you’d like, spin sweet words together and downright coddle your ass, and it won’t faze me one bit.” Karkat lets out an undignified little squawk at your words, and you grin. “So, you know, seriously don’t worry about me thinking you’re this horrible pervert now. You’re going to have to work a lot harder if you actually want to out-weird me. Also, it was nice and I didn’t mind.”

He squints at you as if trying to gauge if you’re serious, and when you roll your eyes and flick his nose with a finger, he lets out an audible sigh of relief. “Oh. Okay then.” A beat, as he seems to recall where you are and what you’re doing. “So, since you didn’t- Well, I should probably...” He trails off, and then you feel him once more moving inside you. Well, you suppose that’s the upside of not having to deal with human erections. There’s no reason why a bulge should just magically stop being prehensile after orgasm, right? You let out a low, pleased moan as he gets back to fucking you.

After a moment you can feel him pushing himself a bit more upright, and then his hand is pumping your dick and you just let it all wash over you, feeling so fucking good that it probably shouldn’t be allowed. One person being this happy has to at the very least be some kind of glitch in the universe, that’s the only explanation. But in case the dick division of the fun police are on their way to shut you down right now, or the universe decides to quantum-snap you out of existence for crimes against boner physics, it’ll 100% be worth it.

Bit by bit, Karkat inches his folded legs under you until your ass is lifted off the bed and your left leg is draped over his shoulder. Then he keeps adjusting his position slightly until he suddenly hits an angle that does something outright undignified to your voice, and you don’t even care. All you can focus on is that he has to keep going; if he stops now you’re pretty sure you’d actually die, and as long as he doesn’t it doesn’t matter what kind of incomprehensible mix of pleading and grunting and whining and slurred babbling leaves your lips. Karkat’s eyes are fixed on you, wide and gleaming as if you’re the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen, even as you’re practically slamming your ass down against his bulge and your every breath comes out more like a helpless sob. His free hand finds yours, and you clutch it desperately, twining your fingers together and feeling like it must be impossible to feel more completely, intimately _whole_ than this.

Karkat lets out a melodious little trilling sound, his arms trembling, and his hand around your dick is getting a bit sloppy and rough now, but it doesn’t matter. Every little bit of friction, every touch, every hot breath against the inside of your thigh, it all adds up to one complex, breathtaking, tortuously beautiful sensation. You try to hold on to it for as long as you can, tensing your body precariously against his and trembling through it, but you can only chase the fractals at the edge of it for so long before there’s no longer any holding back. Your breaths now loud and explosive as if they’re being expelled from you by the whole space ship shaking beneath you, you tilt your head back and feel the way your whole body seems to first pull into your throbbing dick, the tightness in your balls, the pressure inside you that seems to flutter in time with your speeding heartbeat. Then you’re spurting down Karkat’s warm fingers, mixing with the mess he left on your stomach, your breathing scraping to a halt for a heart-stopping second, before flowing out of you in a low moan as your body melts and flows with the moment.

Karkat stays inside you for a while longer, stroking your thighs affectionately, but then a shiver runs through him and he rather urgently pulls out. As you prop yourself up on your elbows to watch him, you see that he actually has a bucket to finish in this time. Since you hadn’t managed to get to this point before now, and even though you were almost obliterated by your orgasm, you still manage to wobble your way to your knees with magnificent Bambi-on-ice levels of gracefulness. You scoot over so that you can caress his back and kiss his neck, as he wraps his bulge around the fingers of one hand and squeezes in a way similar to the intricate tangling usually involved in troll sex. It’s nice to watch, and you make a mental note to try it out on him later.

With an expression saying that he’s doing it against his better judgment, he grabs your right hand and lifts it up to his face, and it doesn’t exactly take a genius to get the hint. Leaning in until your lips are brushing against the velvety surface of his ear, you make a low shushing sound and gently pat his cheek, and feel pretty damn gratified at the way his whole body immediately jolts in response. This time when he comes, he doesn’t hold back, letting out a sharp shout and bucking his hips forward over the bucket in a smooth motion which looks very practiced. Although it’s probably not as much as the first time over, you have to admit it’s pretty fucking hot to watch the way he just pours into that bucket, bright red liquid flowing across his hand and making an absolute mess of the previously clean and shiny metal. You keep murmuring soft encouragement in his ear right until he teeters and is on the verge of pitching forward, almost negating his previous efforts with the bucket.

You make some perfunctory efforts to clean up, removing what looks like a Tarantino homage that spans from your ass and all the way down your thighs, but you’re pretty sure the sheets may be beyond saving. In the end you just toss a new towel over the patch where it soaked through, and toss a new sheet on top of that. You’re sure Karkat will insist you fix it the first thing tomorrow because he’s obnoxious like that, but for now he seems happy enough to curl up in your arms and get really into some pretty intense cuddling.

He seems kind of embarrassed still, and you wonder if the whole quadrant mixing thing really is the troll equivalent of the truly, deeply weird shit. Sounding someone with a plastic fork using only your feet while being dressed like Mr Rogers, or… something. Either way, you’re pretty certain you probably shouldn’t bring this up, unless you want him to work himself into a fit and flail right out of bed, which would be a shame on your prime time snuggle session. So you just kiss the tip of his ear and nuzzle his cheek instead, fingers threading through his hair and gently massaging around his horns, until you hear that sharp whirring sound that lands squarely between cricket chirps and cats purrs, and feel him practically melt against your chest.

“So that was pretty okay,” you mumble, not quite nailing the appropriate nonchalance. Karkat cracks an eye open and gives you an unimpressed look.

“Yeah, I’m guessing you only squirm around and make those sounds when you’re having the very mediocrest sex that a human body is capable of achieving.”

“...I mean, if I’d had any kind of sex before you, I would actually have some stats on how mediocre you were compared to all the other people out there who had previously hankered after my flesh salute. As it is, we’re just going to have to guess.”

You definitely catch a smug little twitch of his lips before he makes an effort to regain his frown. “So is there any reason that you didn’t, other than you being such a colossally awkward bulgelord that only I can put up with you? Being exposed to all of Jade’s heinously inappropriate oversharing, I haven’t been able to avoid the impression that there were quite a few people back there who were extremely eager to sleep with an actual god, to the point where they’d probably overlook even your atrocious personality for a few hours.”

You snort into his hair. “You know, there’s no real need for you to fish for compliments, because I should think it’s fairly obvious.” You manage some manner of shrug even as you wind your arms even tighter around him. “I wasn’t interested in anyone else.” You don’t ask him why he hadn’t, either, because that really is and has been painfully fucking obvious for quite a while. It just took you a while to accept it.

Karkat happily burrows his face against your shoulder, and it does seem like he kind of had been angling for that answer. After all the will-they-won’t-they horseshit, well, you suppose you can’t blame him. He doesn’t exactly have the best self-esteem in the world, and waiting around for a guy who had been giving him all sorts of blatant signals since you were around fourteen-fifteen or so must have taken its toll on it. So you don’t mind flattering his ego a bit now-

“Yeah no, after the first time I laid eyes on your nubby little horns and big fangy mouth it was pretty much game over for me. I peeped into those glaring eyes and listened to you have a phenomenal meltdown in front of everyone, and that was it. By the time that bucket hit you in the face, I knew I’d never want to kiss another pair of lips again.”

-and also teasing him over it, because that’s what you do.

He nips at your shoulder with his sharp goddamn teeth, and you squirm a bit. “...Okay, so apart from me, you clearly have the worst taste in matesprits in the history of the universe. Got it.”

“What? No. I don’t know about you, but I have the _best_ damn taste in men. Didn’t you hear what I just said? Case goddamn closed.” He laughs then, quiet and content, and you grin in turn. “Yeah, that’s what I thought. Besides, on top of being sizzling hot and just about the best friend anyone could have, you’re also into such kinky shit as giving calming reassurance during sex, so I feel like I’ve pretty much won the lottery.”

He tenses up, then elbows you in the ribs without much force or indeed conviction. “You’re such a fucking ass. We’re going to have a talk about the whole subject of quadrant mixing later. An extensive talk, Strider. There will be visual aids and even a fucking graph or two. There might be a pop quiz. You will definitely be expected to take notes. Is that clear?”

“...So you’re saying you’re also into punishing me for being a naughty boy? Aight, I can get into that, I guess. I’ll do my best to channel a proper brat vibe, which is basically just my personality amped up, but for the sake of fidelity to the aesthetic, I feel I’m going to have to demand you wear thigh-high lacquered boots to this lecture.”

“What? What are you even-? Fuck you, that’s not- _Ugh!_ You’re awful.” He squirms around until he’s propped on one elbow, glaring at you from a couple of inches away. “Just shut up and kiss me already, Dave.”

And you do. You will. You don’t ever want to stop. And sure, maybe later it’ll in fact be good to have a talk about what the whole deal is with what you’ve figured out here, but there’s no rush. You’ll have time to work it out. In front of you stretches an uncertain time span and a journey without a concrete goal in mind, but here and now, wrapped up in each others’ arms, that’s at least something you’re sure of. You’ll have time to learn. You’ll have a space that’s just for you. You’ll have each other, and that in itself is almost too good to be true.

Almost, but not quite.


End file.
